Hydrocarbon production operations commonly involve numerous workflows that are repetitive in nature and which are traditionally undertaken manually or semi-manually by the various participants who spend significant portions of their time operating technical applications, finding and entering data, conducting analysis and passing data between participants for various steps such as validation and approval, in order to execute such workflows.
Studies have shown, for example, that about 70% of an engineers time is spent gathering, formatting, and translating data for use in these different applications. For standard production activities, i.e., workflows, this time can be drastically reduced by creating an automated system to execute the prescribed workflow. The automated workflow not only reduces the engineers valuable time doing these repetitive tasks, but also ensures consistency in methods, reduces the likelihood of input errors, and creates a repository for “best practices” that can be maintained long term as personnel (and their knowledge) is moved into and out of the production asset.
Additionally, it is common experience that participants in many workflows have different preferences for, and levels of, expertise on numerous applications, which they utilize at respective steps in common workflows. This diversity makes standardization and consistency difficult to achieve.
Furthermore, due to time demands placed by the various workflows, potentially valuable additional analysis options are not routinely undertaken nor are aggregate data sets routinely reviewed in order to learn from the results.
In other industries, and elsewhere in the exploration and production field, business process management systems and certain specific technical application based workflows are automated and orchestrated using different methods and systems from those described by the present invention. Due to the diversity of technology, applications and workflows however, the challenge of workflow orchestration has largely been unresolved.
For many years automated workflows have been a part of the design and production cycles in other industries like Aerospace, Automotive, and Industrial Manufacturing. These industries have been tying together applications and data sources along with using stochastic analysis methods and optimization to improve their overall productivity.
Today's oil and gas operators face daunting challenges. With rising global demand, declining production, growing data volumes, dwindling resources, mounting regulatory and environmental pressures, exploration and production companies must dramatically improve the management of their hydrocarbon assets. The automation of common workflows can help mitigate these challenges by providing a common, best-practice method of execution that can be sustained and measured.
Execution of these automated workflows also must be examined. As production operations become more complex, their associated workflows will also become more complex. It can not be assumed that the end-user of an automated workflow is an “expert” user and has the knowledge and experience to operate all the needed software application interfaces. Ideally, any platform for automating workflows should include ways for non-expert users to interact with and execute complex workflows that were authored by the domain experts.
Currently, oil and gas production workflow automation is typically done through custom integration of disparate systems often requiring engineers to coordinate data flows between a disparate number of applications. Some common workflows may include, for example:
1. Production management and optimization;
2. Fracture stimulation design optimization;
3. Production forecasting and planning; and
4. Gas-lift allocation and optimization.
The custom integration of multiple applications, however, has many deficiencies and would be better replaced by a more standardized framework of integration.
The advantages of workflow automation and integration of various applications are generally described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,266,619, 6,356,844, 6,853,921, and 7,079,952, which are assigned to Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. and incorporated herein by reference. These patents generally deal with a field wide reservoir management system. The system includes a suite of tools (compute programs) that seamlessly interface with each other to generate a field wide production and injection forecast. The system produces real time control of downhole production and injection control devices such as chokes, valves and other flow control devices and real time control of surface production and injection control devices. The system, however, does not address a flexible framework that encompasses automated workflows, adaptive workflows and synergistic workflows as defined by the present invention.
Therefore, there is a need for a flexible workflow framework that 1) automates various workflows and their routine execution between multiple participants; 2) provides a common operating environment for consistent execution of the workflows, which is capable of substituting applications at various steps in any workflow; and 3) allows additional steps to be introduced into and incorporated within any workflow.
The workflow framework must therefore, address the following:    1. Moving location of boundary conditions, inputs and output extraction within multi-disciplinary and multi-vendor environments;    2. Intelligent generation and execution of up to thousands of multi-disciplinary simulations; and    3. Convenient storage/retrieval and interpretation of the results.